Not Working in U.S. Literature and Art before the Civil War:

“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Walden, Leaves of Grass, and Farmers Nooning

by Christopher Packard

William Sydney Mount, Farmers Nooning, 1836

When Bartleby answers “I prefer not to,” after his boss asks him to do his job, he

irritates everyone in the office. His coworkers and his employer react with various

degrees of ire and disbelief. Bartleby’s continued refusal (is it a refusal?) to work

eventually creates a crisis for his employer that reaches deep into the meaning of

relationships between workers and those who pay them. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity” are

the famously ambiguous last words of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the

Scrivener” (Putnam’s Magazine,1853) and they seem to express despair, not hope, about

the plight of workers.

At first Bartleby works like a machine, and his employer is satisfied. True,

Bartleby is not cheerful about his tasks, but he is reliable and efficient. Then he suddenly

announces that he prefers not to do his job. His employer naturally wonders why.

Bartleby’s oft-repeated line, “I prefer not to,” confounds his employer, who promptly

fires him. But Bartleby prefers not to be fired. His employer asks him to vacate the

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premises; Bartleby prefers to stay. “Since he will not quit me, I must quit him,” reasons

his employer, who moves his business elsewhere, and abandons Bartleby to vagrancy and

the Tombs.

Herman Melville’s short story doesn’t explain why its titular character suddenly

stops preferring to work. On the other hand, the employer’s reaction is amply explored.

From an elitist’s point of view, Bartleby’s assertion of his preference short-circuits all the

employer’s privileges. Melville seems to suggest that the obligations between laborer

and employer go far beyond simple economic transactions exchanging work for money.

Bartleby is not alone among literary figures of the 1850s who simply say no to

conventional jobs. Henry David Thoreau published Walden, or, Life in the Woods in

1854, just a year after Melville published “Bartleby.” From his self-built hut on the

shores of Walden Pond, Thoreau urges convention-bound workers to throw off the

shackles of salaried employment and cookie-cutter professions. By reducing their need

for excessive material consumption, and returning to simpler agrarian habits, workers

need not sell so much of their time and labor to employers. “I do not speak to those who

are well employed,” Thoreau says, “but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented”

with their hard-scrabble lives. Growing and eating one’s own food, bartering with

neighbors for goods and services, and spending vast amounts of time reading books and

studying nature are Thoreau’s prescriptions for a worthwhile life that cures

discontentment. He concludes that about six weeks a year of paid labor is enough to

feed, clothe, and house a frugal scholar.

“Do not hire the man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the

love of it,” is the kind of sentence in Thoreau’s Walden that defies the commonly

accepted capitalist economic principle that labor is a commodity that is bought by

profiteers and sold by those who do not participate in profits. The question of whether

one loved his or her job, for most workers in the years between the American Revolution

and the Civil War, was irrelevant at best, and downright ignorant at worst. The

employment opportunities in the U.S. during 1840s and ‘50s had little to do with love.

The financial panic of 1837 had essentially stopped all business activity for three years,

and confidence in banks and the U.S. currency had suffered. Gold and mineral “rushes”

of the 1840s had revealed avarice among the expansionist-minded citizens, cloaked under

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a banner of Manifest Destiny. Self-interested workers in the West grabbed land from

Native Americans, while perpetrators of chattel slavery wrested free labor from African

Americans. In the cities, children, women, and impoverished immigrants labored in

unregulated markets like laundry, construction, service, and food distribution.

Even members of the ruling classes had to be jacks-of-all-trades to survive in the

free-wheeling world of emergent U.S.-style capitalism under the laissez-faire economic

policies of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characters in

The House of the Seven Gables, for example, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, has

worked as a country schoolmaster, a salesman, an editor; he has practiced dentistry, lived

in a Fourierist commune, and been a paid public lecturer.

Thoreau’s family was not rich, but they managed to send him to Harvard College,

where he bucked the trends: “While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or

the professions, I contemplated … picking huckleberries.” Thoreau’s advice about

working for love instead of money might seem frivolous in the face of such daunting

vicissitudes in the employment picture, but frivolity is hardly a word that applies to his

philosophy. In fact, there is a flavor of Bartleby’s fierce adherence to his own

preferences in Thoreau’s devotion to marching to the beat of his own drum.

At the deepest level, both Thoreau and Melville reject social and economic

systems that dehumanize workers. Both question whether an individual’s free will is

truly free when working for someone else’s profit. Bartleby’s motives for preferring not

to work are inscrutable to outsiders, but his devotion to practicing his preference is

stronger than the social pressures surrounding him. Thoreau, too, is a boulder in the

stream when it comes to conforming to social and economic expectations of the

conventional workplace.

Another contemporary of Melville and Thoreau who writes against conventional

ideas about work and money is Walt Whitman in his stunning poem Leaves of Grass

(1855), in which the first few stanzas ask his readers to stop and smell the roses:

Loafe with me on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your

throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or

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lecture, not even the best,

Only the lull I like, and the valved sound of your voice

Whitman’s invitation to stop working and lie down on the grass for a tête-à-tête is a far

cry from Bartleby’s isolation from the workaday world on Wall Street, but it is too an

argument against the mind-dulling effects of meaningless or redundant work. Like

Thoreau and Melville, Whitman had read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential essays

calling for originality sprouting from American soil, and like them he reached outside

convention for inspiration.

Whitman celebrates loafing and leisure. He relishes phrases that seduce readers

into the pleasures of reading. But Whitman is not anti-work; on the contrary, he lavishes

workers with poetry, heaps words of praise upon the professions. He later assigned the

sub-title “Songs for the Occupations” to his long descriptive lists, or catalogues, of

workers doing their jobs. Just a snippet here showing Whitman’s buoyant approving

verbs and roving eye:

The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill,

The pavingman leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the

note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold,

The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker

waxes his thread.

Whitman’s “Songs for the Occupations” is inclusive, expansive; it indulges in joyous

language about the huge variety of workers in the U.S. during the middle of the

nineteenth century. He mentions each and approves of all. Known as the poet of

inclusion, Whitman brings praise to all professions, including underclass workers like

prostitutes, orphaned children, illiterate fur-trappers, and even criminals. Instead of

affirming certain jobs as conferring elevated status over others, Whitman labels all who

work as good, and all who labor as dignified. Whitman would probably agree with

Thoreau that workers should love what they do more than the money they earn.

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Like Walt Whitman, the painter William Sydney Mount (1807-1868) celebrates

laborers, but unlike the poet of New York City, he paints country folks in landscapes,

mostly of Long Island and Stony Brook where he lived. Like similar stylists known as the

American Genre Painters, Mount’s crisp lines and identifiably American scenes were

popular in the city’s galleries and among patrons of the arts. Mount’s farmers,

blacksmiths, fishers, and peddlers who are often depicted relaxing after work, often

playing musical instruments. (In addition to a virtuoso painter, Mount was an avid

musician, violin-maker, and composer.)

One of Mount’s best-known of his paintings is “Farmers Nooning” (1836).

Figure 1 William Sydney Mount, Farmers Nooning, 1836.

The story told in Farmers Nooning (figure 1) is fairly simple: five farmers have stopped

haying for lunch and a nap under a noonday sun. A boy tickles the ear of a dozing

farmer, while in the foreground co-workers rest among their lunch-time leftovers. Mount

has captured an image that conveys ease, even pleasure. Look at the way the five figures

in this image are overlapping on the canvas; their bodies are all contiguous. The painter

has connected them all to each other, implying that they belong together. While harmony

is not precisely the same as equality, this group seems to be in accord.

A closer look reveals a deeper story about status: the orderly fences and the

cropped fields in the background – even the haycock used temporarily as a bed – all

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suggest work done before the painter captured this moment, presumably by these farmers.

Who did the work is not in question: the farmers have earned the “nooning” part of their

day by building, seeding, growing, and now harvesting their neatly kept fields.

The abundance of the harvest in the background also implies prosperity on this

Long Island farm, but whose profit is represented here?

Figure 2. The pleasure on this sleeper’s face, and the beaming sunshine, imply a message about his importance in this group. Detail, Farmers Nooning

The central figure occupies pride of place in this scene, and the sunlight highlights

his importance. His shirt is sparkling white and clean, and his pants are neatly buttoned.

His rolled-up sleeves and open collar signify work prior to this moment, but his neatness

contrasts with the tattered shoes and patched clothes on the farmer lying on his stomach

in the shade. Clearly the African-American farmer does not hold a secondary status in

this group. The sleeper’s outsized brawn, too, indicates favoritism, and his pose

welcomes the sunshine beaming down, as if heaven itself approves of his well-earned

rest. Having broken bread with this crew of workers, and with his rake nearby, ready to

be taken up again after the noon hour, but for now the figure is the picture of relaxation.

His expression shows he likes it.

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Figure 3. One of the farmers sharpens a tool while “nooning” with

the others, but the shadows imply he is less important than the

sleeping figure. Detail from Farmer’s Nooning.

Mount does not exclude images of work from Farmers Nooning, but he downplays their

importance. In figure 3, one of the farmers keeps his hands busy during the noon hour,

sharpening his scythe. If Mount meant this industrious fellow to serve as a moral lesson

about getting ahead through hard work, his position at the edge of the group, and the

dappled shade falling on him, relegate him to secondary status.

In 1836 when it was first shown in a gallery in New York City, Farmers Nooning

was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, and a big reason for its praise is the rendering

of its central figure. Reviewers of the day called the figure “a Negro farmer,” a “black

fellow,” a “Negro,” but never a slave. (Slavery had been outlawed in New York State ten

years prior.) Critics lauded Mount’s skill in capturing the human form in a realistic style

and praised his subject matter: thrifty, successful agrarian Americans in a picture of

harmony. Farmers Nooning was reproduced and sold as print and appeared in a popular

magazine in 1845. It thus achieved in Antebellum America iconic status as an image of

national ideals. Mount emphasizes the aesthetic and therefore ennobling features of these

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workers, but reserves special notice for the sleeping farmer as a favored figure in the

arrangement.

Paintings of laborers at rest, poems about loafing, essays about berry-picking --

what was going on in the U.S. to make so many mid-nineteenth century writers and

painters promote leisure over work? They seem to send a message to readers: sit still,

relax, slow down. Why?

Melville was no slouch as a writer, and Thoreau’s literary output was massive.

Whitman wrote daily all his life, up until the day he died, and Mount produced more

masterpieces of American Genre painters than anyone else. They did not practice what

they preached. Far from promoting laziness, they each offered wisdom in exchange for

slowing down. Selling one’s labor by itself might lead to material advancement and a

certain degree of elevated status in national culture, but work itself is not a pathway to

higher knowledge. Reading is not work. Looking at art is not work. Writers and

painters work to produce items that are consumed in repose, that are intended to

reverberate in the mind after being consumed, implanting ideas and guiding attitudes.

Stop and smell the roses, these authors and this painter seem to say. Read. Look.

Learn. The meaning of work comes not from doing it, not even exchanging work for

money, but from thinking about it. And all thinking workers should heed Melville’s

warning in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”: not working can lead to social rejection, isolation,

and obscurity.